The money he earned from that job was enough to put Cocioba through the first years of his biology degree at Stony Brook University. He completed a stint with a neglected plant biology group that taught him to experiment on a shoestring budget. “We used toothpicks and yogurt cups to make petri dishes and all that,” he said. But financial difficulties forced him to drop out of school. Before leaving, one of his lab mates gave him a tube of agricultural bacteria – a type of bacteria commonly used to impart new properties to plants.
A bioengineered petunia by Sebastian Cocioba, a plant biotechnology researcher working at his home lab in Huntington, New York on October 30, 2024.Lanna Apisukh
A shelf growing bioengineered plants under the indoor grow lights of Sebastian Cocioba on October 30, 2024. The plant biotechnology researcher built a laboratory inside his house where he works in Huntington, New York.Lanna Apisukh
Test tubes of petunia plants under grow lights in Huntington, New York on October 30, 2024. The flowers were collected by Sebastian Cocioba, a plant biotechnology researcher working at the lab at his home, biological treatment.Lanna Apisukh
Cocioba began turning the corner of his hallway into a makeshift laboratory. He realized he could buy cheap equipment in fire sales from closing laboratories and sell them for a profit. “That gives me a little bit of an income,” he said. Then he learned how to 3D print relatively simple devices that were sold at extremely high prices. For example, a light box used to display DNA could be put together using some cheap LEDs, a piece of glass, and a light switch. Similar equipment would retail to laboratories for hundreds of dollars. “I have this 3D printer and it is the most useful technology for me,” Cocioba said.
All of this tinkering is in support of Cocioba’s main mission: to become a floral designer. “Imagine the Willy Wonka of flowers, without the sexism, racism and strange little slaves,” he said. In the United States, genetically modified flower products have the lowest biosafety rating, so Cocioba or his lab are not subject to strict regulations. Gene editing as an amateur in the UK or EU is impossible, he says.
Cocioba describes himself as a “piper for hire”—working for startups to develop scientific proofs of concept. Before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, plant biologist Elizabeth Hénaff asked Cocioba for help with a project she was working on: designing a morning glory flower with the blue-and-white Olympic checkerboard motif. It so happened that in nature there existed a species of checkerboard flower – the snake head flower. Cocioba wondered if he could import some of the genes from that plant into spinach. Unfortunately, it turns out that this garter snake has one of the largest genomes on the planet and has never been sequenced. When the Olympics were about to take place, the project failed. “Of course, it ended in heartbreak because we couldn’t make it happen.”
Close-up of petunia tissue culture grown by Sebastian Cocioba, a plant biotechnology researcher based in Huntington, New York, on October 30, 2024.Lanna Apisukh
Test tubes containing frozen DNA and plant enzymes inside the home laboratory of Sebastian Cocioba, a plant biotechnology researcher based in Huntington, New York on October 30, 2024.Lanna Apisukh
As Cocioba moved deeper into the world of synthetic biology, he began to shift his focus a bit — away from just creating new plants and toward opening up the tools of science. Now he records his experiments in an online notebook that anyone can use for free. He also started selling some of the plasmids – small loops of plant DNA – that he used to transform flowers.
“We are certainly in the golden age of biotechnology,” he said. Greater accessibility and a more open research community than ever before. Cocioba is trying to recreate something like the boom of amateur plant breeding in the 19th century—where hobbyist scientists shared their material partly for the joy of creating produce new plant varieties. “You don’t have to be a professional scientist to do science,” Cocioba said.
In addition to this work, Cocioba is also a project scientist at California-based startup Senseory Plants. The company wants to engineer indoor plants to create unique scents—a biodynamic alternative to candles or incense. One idea he is testing is to make a plant that smells like old books, turning a room into an ancient library using the sense of smell. The startup is exploring the entire space of evocative scents, Cocioba said, partly designed in his home lab. “I really, really love what they’re doing.”
This article appears in the January/February 2025 issue of the magazine British WIRED magazine.
